Boudelaa Sami
Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Humanity and Social Sciences, United Arab Emirates University Al Ain, United Arab Emirates ; Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK.
Front Psychol. 2015 Jan 22;5:1557. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01557. eCollection 2014.
Educators and therapists in the Arab world have not been able to benefit from the recent integration of basic behavioral science with neuroscience. This is due to the paucity of basic research on Arabic. The present study is a step toward establishing the necessary structure for the emergence of neuro-rehabilitory and educational practices. It focuses on the recent claim that consonants and vowels have distinct representations, carry different kinds of information, and engage different processing mechanisms. This proposal has received support from various research fields, however it suprisingly stops short of making any claims about the time course of consonant and vowel processing in speech. This study specifically asks if consonants and vowels are processed differentially over time, and whether these time courses vary depending on the kind of information they are associated with. It does so in the context of a Semitic language, Arabic, where consonants typically convey semantic meaning in the form of tri-consonantal roots, and vowels carry phonological and morpho-syntactic information in the form of word patterns. Two cross-modal priming experiments evaluated priming by fragments of consonants that belong to the root, and fragments of vowels belonging to the word pattern. Consonant fragments were effective primes while vowel fragments were not. This demonstrates the existence of a differential processing time course for consonants and vowels in the auditory domain, reflecting in part the different linguistic functions they are associated with, and argues for the importance of assigning distinct representational and processing properties to these elements. At broader theoretical and practical levels, the present results provide a significant building block for the emergence of neuro-rehabilitory and neuro-educational traditions for Arabic.
阿拉伯世界的教育工作者和治疗师未能从基础行为科学与神经科学的近期整合中受益。这是由于对阿拉伯语的基础研究匮乏。本研究朝着为神经康复和教育实践的出现建立必要结构迈出了一步。它聚焦于最近的一种观点,即辅音和元音具有不同的表征、携带不同类型的信息并涉及不同的处理机制。这一观点已得到各个研究领域的支持,然而令人惊讶的是,它并未就语音中辅音和元音处理的时间进程提出任何主张。本研究专门探讨辅音和元音在时间上是否被差异处理,以及这些时间进程是否因它们所关联的信息类型而异。这是在一种闪米特语——阿拉伯语的背景下进行的,在阿拉伯语中,辅音通常以三辅音词根的形式传达语义,而元音以词形模式的形式携带音系和形态句法信息。两项跨模态启动实验评估了属于词根的辅音片段和属于词形模式的元音片段所引发的启动效应。辅音片段是有效的启动刺激,而元音片段则不是。这证明了在听觉领域辅音和元音存在差异处理的时间进程,部分反映了它们所关联的不同语言功能,并论证了为这些元素赋予不同表征和处理特性的重要性。在更广泛的理论和实践层面,目前的结果为阿拉伯语的神经康复和神经教育传统的出现提供了一个重要的基石。